Wandering, wandering and wandering some more!

Friday night this week was a quiet night, due to a lot of the teachers having the night off because of Middle School midterms. I went home to find out more information about Grammy, since the only information I had was about her fall. She's in a rehab facility for a while, but she'll be ok. Unfortunately, I was a bit stressed about that and was awake til about 3 AM worrying, so I finally just called her at 3AM my time. I was a bit tired when I had to get up for work on Saturday at 8, but I survived the day. barely.

So, I taught my one class on Saturday, then wandered around the area near Ehwa University with J. We had a few hours between the end of our classes and meeting with the other teachers to look at the cherry blossoms on Yeouido, a smallish island in Seoul. Kind of like Fox Island, but very developed.

J and I looked at the shops for a while. We saw this very cute couple:

They were even holding hands. I actually chased them down to get this picture, but didn't want to sprint past them to take a picture from the front, making it all the more obvious I was trying to take their picture.

We then ate lunch. We went to an Italian restaurant and I ordered some pesto, which was a different color than I was expecting, but it was very delicious. My friend, Mr. Octopus, came in the pasta. Good thing I like octopus otherwise I would have been in for a shock!


After lunch, we headed back to meet Queena, Tae, Steve and Feng Xia. We made our way over to Yeoido, really looking forward to all the blossoms we were going to see. They were all quite beautiful! It was just amazing.



I mean, just look at all of the Blossoms!!

Wait, you don't see them?? Neither did we...apparently we came just a couple days late, so we missed them. Oops. There were lots of petals on the ground, but none actually on the trees.

But it was ok. It was a beautiful day out, so we just wandered around the park. There was a lovely cement park, but then there was actual nature.


Me, Steve and Tae.
Queena, J, me, Steve, Feng Xia


Tae and Steve's bromance picture...



Steve and Queena




















We attempted to make it look like we were holding each other. We almost got it!

We just walked around the park and enjoyed the beautiful weather. And we laughed a ton. It was a great time! At one point, we thought we saw some cherry blossoms in the distance and attempted to get there by climbing through the bushes. We were all yelling, pretending to be sneaky. I yelled "SERPENTINE" which as most of you know, is a very normal thing for me to yell, especially with mother as my mother, but I guess it is not and they thought it was quite funny. hahaha. I was surprised!

After walking around for a long time, we went to get dinner and chatted for quite a while. And we enjoyed the sunset a little bit.

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That evening, Queena and I met Bree and Jane from work at a club. I had never been to a club before, so it was definitely a new experience...I felt a tad overwhelmed since it was extremely crowded. Not my thing, at least one that size!

Sunday, I went to church with Queena, Steve, Octavian and Kim for Easter. We then spent the day together and wandered around a bit. It was a low-key but very nice Easter. I chatted with the family, the Clouds and Alyson Singh on Skype this morning/Easter for them, which was great! Although they were distracted by a Princess Diana special, which was taking their attention away from me. ;-)

I taught class this afternoon, but have the evening off which I am spending doing student evaluations! Very fun. aka not, hence the blog writing.

Gmail has begun to warn me every single time I open an email as though I don't know that I am in a different country using the internet...It really needs to stop that.

Anyway, I'm off to do student evaluations. Blogs to come as I do more exciting things!

Cherry Blossoms at Gyeongbok

So, I wandered over to Gyeongbok Palace, because I wanted to take pictures of the newly blossomed cherry trees. There was just a slight problem. They were either not yet fully bloomed or half dead. But I did what I could with what I had. I think my pictures turned out pretty well!

This one is definitely my favorite:

My adventure there involved me minding my own business waiting for the subway to come, but then suddenly a man's face was directly next to my face yelling "ARE YOU FROM ENGLAND!?" I was startled and said "No I'm not." He said "WHERE ARE YOU FROM!?" I said "America" and he said "oh" then looked disappointed and wandered off.

Then, while wandering around Gyeongbok, there were bajillions of Middle School students on various field trips to the grounds. I noticed because every single one of them felt the need to say "HELLO WHERE ARE YOU FROM!?" The joys of always looking like a foreigner! A small group of about four middle school students stopped me and asked if they could talk with me to practice their English. I said yes of course, then they made me take a picture with them.

So basically, I just wandered around on my own, saying hello to about a hundred strangers, taking tons of pictures of the palace with the blossoms. It was very beautiful.


























I took some other pictures as well.


I took pictures of more statues, because I think they are cool. and some of them are funny.
Like this one who is smiling broadly
and this monkey. because he's awesome

Then, I made a discovery. Apparently, when Elaine and I were exploring Gyeongbok, we did not see the whole thing. We missed just a small section. This included the following places:

















I'm not entirely sure how we managed to miss all of that, but I'm glad I managed to find it on Thursday! Oops. Perhaps we had lingering jet lag and managed to wander off in a fog without seeing half the palace.

After the palace, I went to work and taught a very small class of middle school students since they are all having midterms at the moment. Then this weekend had lots of fun, which I will blog about later!

This said: "caucus race" which I thought was pretty funny...wrong word person making Alice in Wonderland journal.